Wu Qi: In the past few years, scholars inside and outside of China have been paying close attention to international news treating the US election and Brexit, and their moods have varied widely, but they have come to feel that the progress of globalization is in crisis. What are your thoughts about this? Has this influenced your assessment of globalization?

Xiang Biao: I think it’s funny when people in the United States say the victory of Trump is a crisis, the darkest day in the history of humanity. In China, “crisis” was an important concept in the 1980s. It was said that China had to have a “crisis consciousness,*” otherwise it might lose its “right to exist on the planet (qiuji*).” “River Elegy” also talked about the civilizational crisis. But this was a crisis that intellectuals fabricated themselves. What is a crisis? In the practice of the lives of everyday people, when young peoples’ friendships fall apart, this might be a crisis; when you gamble in the stock market and lose, this is not necessarily a crisis, but if you’ve already bragged to your friends that you were going to make money when in fact you lose, this might be a crisis. A crisis is not merely a failure, it’s a failure without an explanation.

Whether Trump’s election could be a crisis for world development is a question intellectuals made up themselves. It is a fact that Trump was elected, and we have to understand why. The most important thing is that the Democrats did not do a good job in Wisconsin and other swing states, which meant that the vote in those states suddenly changed, and the reason for this is that heavy industry declined in these areas. This truly is a bit contingent and does not reflect a major change in America as a whole, and to get a grasp of how important it is we would have to get a sense of proportion. After all, more people still voted for the Democrats. Now they are talking about Russian interference, which is kind of funny. Aren’t Americans stirring up color revolutions all the time?

Second, even if Russia did interfere by influencing public opinion, when people voted they were crystal clear on the policies and the person they voted for. My feeling is that all of this is just an attempt by the middle class to find an explanation for something they don’t understand, and is an exaggeration of the crisis. I prefer to look at all this noise with a sense of distance to try to see what the underlying issue is. My first thought was that this was an adjustment between two Americas, one being a globalized, elite America, and the other being a local, populist America. Trump represented a reaction of populist America against the elites. In the long term, there is no clear evidence that Trump will have a disastrous effect on the world situation.

A sense of distance is the same thing as a sense of history. When certain things happen, I sense that there is no need to go overboard looking for a symbolic explanation. Life is not all that long, only 70 or 80 years, and if during that time something happens for two or three days, then we should put it in context and assess its importance. History always changes like this. I feel a certain sense of distance from Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997), and do not see him as my spiritual guide, but I appreciate the sense of distance he attached to his analysis of world history. He never made direct judgments, but rather offered reminders, saying that we cannot know at present whether history is unfolding in a good or bad way, but here are the possible dangers. What he offers is a cautious pushback from an intellectual’s perspective, and while most people are swept up in the big trends, he sees through them, offering a gentle reminder of the factors behind the trends. His reminders are based on careful analysis and observation and are not merely on general principles.

In the 1950s, there was an important debate at Oxford on “What is History?” between Berlin and the leftist historian Edward Hallett Carr (1882–1982), based on their different views of how to understand the success of the Soviet Union. At first, I was on Carr’s side, but later on, came to feel that Berlin made important points as well. To put it simply, Carr said that the USSR had already succeeded and that the role of historians was to explain why it succeeded because we need to know why it happened. Of course, he is right, and when today’s liberals are saying that Trump is a disaster they are not looking at the background factors that explain the “disaster.” But Berlin’s view was that we don’t know if some necessary force explains the success of the Soviet Union, because all historical facts are the product of many contingent factors, nor do we know what the final outcome will be. What we can do today is based on historical experience, and our own moral principles, to issue warnings and reminders concerning where possible dangers might be, what impact present developments might have. We need to be prepared, and not just explain the facts as they are. Both ways of thinking are important.

Wu Qi: Trump nonetheless represents an agenda that is anti-globalization and pro-protectionism, in which all countries retreat within their own borders. Younger generations have more directly and widely benefitted from globalization, which is why many of them dislike Trump. In your experience of working on globalization, have you seen anything that tells you that the tide of globalization is turning?

Xiang Biao: Right now, a lot of anti-globalization is just talk, and we don’t know what the result of Trump’s policies will be on issues like taxes and the environment. Of course, the discourse itself is important; it is anti-globalization, but the discourse itself is a global phenomenon because people are talking about it everywhere. This is like decolonization from the 1940s through the 1960s, when the original unified colonial markets became independent countries, which was also an important process of globalization. National independence was a global movement, global dialogue and exchange involving Asia, Africa, and Latin America. From that perspective, I don’t quite know what the true impact of the call for anti-globalization is on the thought and behavior of young people. China is a big country and enjoys the great advantage that even if everyone is not engaged in globalization, there is a lot of space left within the country. This issue of globalization and anti-globalization may be a bit made-up, by which I mean we are often misled by terms used by the media.

Wu Qi: On this issue, in China, there has been another reaction, which is a resurgence of patriotism. At the same time that some people are saddened by restrictions on globalization (you just gave your opinion on that), another group of young people has embraced a narrative of China that is even more local, even more nationalistic. Maybe we could compare this process with the rise of populism in the United States and Europe, since they occurred pretty much at the same time.

Xiang Biao: First, whether this is anti-globalization depends on our definition. We usually say that after the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, all of communism was swept up in the Western-led global market economy, the advancement of technology and transportation, the whole “end of history” thing—in which history was no longer pushed forward by the dialectical movement of antagonistic contradictions, and instead, everyone identified with certain ideas, and we all moved forward smoothly together. As to whether Brexit and Trump mean that they are against this process, that they want to reduce international trade and international exchange, so that contradictions once again become the main motor of progress—I think it’s too early to tell.

Brexit is actually quite complicated. Many of those who voted to leave the European Union were farmers who have not fared well in recent years, and whose lives are difficult, but the true leaders of Brexit, like Boris Johnson, belong to the elite. This made up the so-called blue-collar-purple socks pact. “Blue collar” means the working class, and “purple socks” means the upper class, because British upper-class gentlemen often appear in gray suits and sport bright-colored socks, but why would the purple socks want to leave? These people have no sense of nationalism. An Indian author once wrote that Britain has monarchism, republicanism, and racism, but no nationalism, because Britain has always looked at the world from an imperial perspective, and when Britain became a nation it took the form of a global empire. What Boris Johnson says is that he wants to return to the glory the United Kingdom knew as an imperial power, and that Britain has always been a global power, so why are they now wasting time with European officials in Brussels? This is what he said to voters, that once Brexit succeeded, Britain’s relations with China and with India would be even better, and he is no doubt expecting to have a free trade deal with the United States, which would make up for the losses incurred by leaving Europe. It is hard to say if this is a return to the model of the nation-state as the principal player. From the American perspective, abandoning globalization is truly hard to imagine, because most of the American economy is global, and its trade war with China is about a fight over who will control the globe and the basic technology of 5G, etc. This is not a fight between two countries, but a fight between two world powers. For this reason, globalization will not diminish. Instead, it means that from now on, the global lens through which we analyze questions has to become all the more acute. This is the first thing.

Second, it also means that the concrete form of globalization can certainly change. At the outset, we thought that globalization was like a solution to China’s developmental problems. In China’s reform and opening, the opening was more important than reform, and in fact, the more open we were the more momentum we gained for reform. Deng Xiaoping said that we had to learn from the outside world, open markets to foreigners in order to obtain foreign technology, and therefore promote internal reform. Now it seems that globalization is not necessarily a solution to all our problems, and may even bring new problems and dilemmas.

You mentioned the China narrative. Many people in China feel the need to tell such a narrative because we have the ingredients, the self-confidence, and the stamina to tell China’s story. But my point is that such a psychological need is itself a problem. Why is One Belt-One Road a China story? What do the Pakistanis or the Ethiopians involved in the project have to say about it? This is complicated. If you talk with Chinese diplomats, especially those involved with foreign trade or finance, or those who are building projects, you might discover that they have difficulties they cannot talk about, because they don’t want to make everything related to One Belt-One Road a “China story.” Because if that’s how things are, then the eyes of the world are focused on you, thinking that your investments are all the results of Beijing’s strategic plot. While in matter of fact, many times there’s a Chinese guy who can’t sell his shoes in China, so he goes to Africa, but once they are out of China, everyone else thinks that the Sichuanese workers, the Henanese farmers, and the Wenzhou people selling lighters are all part of the China State Construction Engineering Corporation, that they are all part of the One Belt-One Road plan. Given the size of China’s economy, it is normal that people leave, whether they have the support of the authorities or not. And yet we insist on making these rich and varied stories into one story, stressing out people who don’t need more stress.

So from where I stand, the China narrative is quite narrow-minded and is trying to define the self in terms of formal institutions. You are a Chinese person, born and raised in China, this is a fact, but when you look at things, you might be a mother, or a daughter, or a 60-year-old retired teacher, all of whom will have their own perspective on things. When you take a trip to Thailand, you might be interested in how retirees there spend their free time, or when you go to Europe, you might feel close to European mothers. Even more important, you are all ordinary people, with no connection to state power, not knowing much about state policy, so why should you look at the world from the state perspective? Those who feel that they must have a China narrative may do so because of some feeling of insecurity in their own lives, and thus they need to tie everything up in a huge ribbon to feel secure.

Wu Qi: Can we keep teasing out the China narrative? In an anthropological sense, there are a lot of people today who are embracing rural philosophies and everyday life, in political practice we’ve had the “people’s philosophy,” if we go back further there is traditional thought, which even today can boast of certain concrete achievements. Which of these do you feel are healthy or meaningful?

Xiang Biao: It is indeed more meaningful to unpack the China narrative and look at specific issues. For example, if we compare our levels of economy and life expectancy with those of India, then China’s results are better. But now, China’s overall situation in terms of public health and education is facing new crises. The number of children that drop out of school is quite high, and education in the villages has run into many difficulties. When we look at successful experiences and stress that these are Chinese experiences, Chinese characteristics, then what was China doing in the four thousand years before we achieved these successes? How did we wind up so backward? What are the reasons behind our current success and why is education again in crisis, we have to look at all of this historically. All of this is happening in China, and there are lots of Chinese elements involved, but you cannot conclude that the results we get are because China did it. There are many factors working together in the context of China. Social science tries to disentangle these elements and look at them one by one, to figure out which are the core elements.

One way to unpack the China narrative into specific questions is through comparison, for instance comparing China’s success with that of South Korea, one of the original “Four Asian Dragons,” or with Europe. Europe may not be handling things particularly well at the moment, while China can mobilize an entire province or the entire country to get something done, which is impressive. But the thing is that you also have to think about next year, about what effect your way of doing things will have ten years on. Europe is more mature about this. It’s true that there are protests and demonstrations every day, and people complain constantly, but this is what Europe is, and it is also a form of political wisdom. It may well be that no Chinese would want to be Prime Minister of Britain, who gets yelled at all day, every day. It’s unpleasant, and no one sings your praises. But the politicians seem to enjoy it, and feel like responding to the challenges of their political enemies is an occasion to test their political wisdom. Chinese culture would have a hard time accepting this. But this is what life is, right? In your family life you can’t have projects or achievements every day; every morning you talk about what’s for breakfast, and one person chooses soy milk while the other eats a doughnut.

The other way of unpacking the China narrative has to do with the method of evaluation. How do we decide what “success” is? From whose point of view? In what time frame? For example, the debate between Qin Hui* (b. 1953) and Lü Xinyu* (b. 1965) on slums is valuable.Footnote 1 Our cities don’t have slums, which is a great achievement for China, but from a farmer’s perspective, a slum is one more life possibility, a step toward the city, which does not exist without the ghetto. If you look at India and the Philippines, slums have become an important political force, whereas in China we just demolish whatever we want to demolish, and the cost of living keeps going up, which creates a lot of pressure. This is part of an intellectual’s training, to not get overexcited about something without understanding it. If we say China’s cities are well-run, then we also have to ask: Where are the people that used to be there, and what do they think about all this? Why were similar people in other countries not moved out of the slums? We have to look at things from both sides.